Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Consumer Complaint Database

Introduction

As part of Dodd-Frank, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created. The bureau’s purpose is to provide consumer protection in the financial sector. One of the ways they attempt to fulfill this charter is providing the public with data on various complaints they receive. Since the entity’s inception, they have received close to half a million complaints regarding consumer finances. The agency provides data for each complaint and we have taken some of that data to create this visualization.

Visualization

Filters and Displays

Company

This allows you to sort through different companies to see the number of complaints they have received. You can search for the specific company or scroll through the large list of entities. The entire graphic will filter based on your choice here or, by simply clicking on the company’s bar graph within the visualization

Product

Using this filter to make all the visualizations display information on a specific financial product such as credit reporting, mortgages, student loans, and many more.

Issue

This is allows you filter the exact issue that was reported to the CFPB.

State

This allows the viewer to filter by the state the consumers mailing address is located in.

Source

I was able to find the source for this data at data.gov , but the data’s host and provider is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and can be found here. There was only a basic level of analysis performed here and you are able to really dive into the specifics of the complaints if that is something you would like to do. After downloading the datafile, I opened it in tableau so I could render these images.